The White Book
3.490 kr.Shortlisted for the Man Booker International 2018
From the author of The Vegetarian, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2016
From the author of The Vegetarian and Human Acts comes a book like no other. The White Book is a meditation on colour, beginning with a list of white things. It is a book about mourning, rebirth and the tenacity of the human spirit. It is a stunning investigation of the fragility, beauty and strangeness of life.
Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith.
Greek Lessons
3.490 kr.In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages. Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive.
Flights
3.490 kr.Flights, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk’s most ambitious to date. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. From the eighteenth century, we have the story of a North African-born slave turned Austrian courtier stuffed and put on display after his death. In the nineteenth century, we follow Chopin’s heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw. In the present we have the trials of a wife accompanying her much older husband as he teaches a course on a cruise ship in the Greek islands, and the harrowing story of a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanish on a holiday on a Croatian island. With her signature grace and insight, Olga Tokarczuk guides the reader beyond the surface layer of modernity and towards the core of the very nature of humankind.
Morning and Evening
3.990 kr.A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes’s father’s thoughts as his wife goes into labour, and ending with Johannes’s own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.
Septology
4.690 kr.What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers – two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions about death, love, light and shadow, faith and hopelessness. Septology is a transcendent exploration of the human condition by Jon Fosse, the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, and a radically other reading experience – incantatory, hypnotic and utterly unique.
The Empusium
4.390 kr.In September 1913, a young tuberculosis-stricken Pole checks into Wilhelm Opitz’s Gentlemen’s Health Resort in the Silesian mountains. Each evening, residents indulge in local, hallucinogenic liqueur and engage in lively debates on topics like monarchy vs. democracy, women’s equality, and war vs. peace. A hundred years after ‘The Magic Mountain’, Olga Tokarczuk explores Thomas Mann’s territory, masterfully weaving horror, comedy, and folklore into her narrative.
Skýin eru skuggar – ljóðaúrval
4.590 kr.Nóbelsskáldið Jon Fosse byrjaði snemma að yrkja, að sögn fyrir fermingu, og eitt af því fyrsta sem hann setti á blað var ljóð um hafið, dauðann og ástina. Síðan hefur hann orðið einn af mikilvægustu rithöfundum samtímans og ber þar hæst prósaverk og leikrit, en ljóðlistin hefur þó alla tíð fylgt honum og er mikilvægur hluti af höfundarverkinu í heild.
Þetta ljóðaúrval spannar fjóra áratugi á ferli skáldsins og veitir góða innsýn í þá veröld sem verk hans snúast um.
Aðalsteinn Ásberg Sigurðsson íslenskaði.